Promoting productive struggle in middle school math classrooms
Date
2017
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
A problem in my district where I am the math specialist is a lack of student
productive struggle around the mathematics in middle school math classrooms. By
productive struggle I mean students attempting to make sense of something that is not
immediately apparent, working towards reconfiguring their understanding of facts,
ideas, or procedures (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007). I visited each middle school math
teacher at the beginning of this school year (September 2016) observing that 80% of
middle level classrooms demonstrated lessons where students were mostly applying
memorized or modeled procedures on routine exercises. I observed only 6% of teachers
leading lessons where students were meaningfully engaged in making sense of the
mathematics (the other 14% were providing problems for students to make sense of the
mathematics but were routinizing or over-scaffolding problems to remove important
opportunities for students to productively struggle). This lack of productive struggle is
important as my district wants its students to understand mathematics conceptually and
productive struggle is one of few research-supported ways to support this conceptual
growth (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007). ☐ My goal was to understand more about teachers’ growth in creating a culture
where students productively struggle with the mathematics. I also wanted to understand
more about how teachers’ beliefs about teaching changed as they began to shift some of
the mathematical authority to their students. Lastly, I wanted to examine how this
transition towards a culture of productive struggle impacted students’ beliefs about
mathematics and themselves. ☐ Professional development (PD) was the main avenue I pursued to support my
goals—session based PD, continuous on-site support, and having teachers learn from
teaching. This PD was designed to help teachers make this shift towards a classroom
that promoted productive struggle. Then via anonymous teacher surveys, student
interviews, and classroom observations I attempted to discern whether and how this PD
affected both teachers and students. ☐ The results were promising, particularly in terms of teachers’ evolution in both
practice and beliefs. Overall teacher improvement in terms of productive struggle was
positive as the percentage of teachers at the lowest score on the rubric diminished from
80% to 49% over the course of the school year though there is still ample room for
growth. A cohort of teachers found two PD interventions—co-planning lessons and
discussions about math education—to be especially helpful in their growth in having
their students take more ownership in doing the mathematics. Student attitudes were
also primarily encouraging as they reflected on their classroom experiences compared
to prior years. ☐ As a next step I would recommend interviewing students immediately after the
teacher performs an intervention that helps promote student productive struggle. The
student interviews led to general feelings of satisfaction but were infrequently tied to
specific teacher actions that created these feelings. I would also ask for more specific,
immediate feedback from teachers related to the various professional development
interventions to target what exactly about the professional development they found
helpful.
Description
Keywords
Education, Changing teacher beliefs, Math education, Productive struggle, Teacher improvement